Is God Both a Deterrent and Distraction?

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/10/28/study-thinking-of-god-can-dampen-motivation-but-help-resist-temptation/

An issue that comes up often in atheist/theist discussions is whether belief in God is beneficial to theists in any sense beyond their personal comfort or if it’s damaging to them in creating a codependence upon a higher power. The American Psychological Association released a study a month ago that suggests a bit of both. I’m not surprised this seems to be the case and with my curiosity on psychology of religion (even if I still haven’t read William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience) I’m intrigued about the ambivalence. The general conclusions they drew were that if you believed in God while doing some activity, there was evidence that you were less motivated to put your full effort in, but if you were tempted by sweets and had God on your mind, you were less likely to eat them. It’s unavoidable that we’ll deal with people that believe or disbelieve in God on a daily basis, whether we realize it or not. Our own psychology as it relates to God belief or lack thereof can help us understand others as well in that we might share these tendencies to some degree.

With evidence from the study that God is a deterrent against temptation, people would no doubt use this as a support for how God belief is more beneficial in the long run. But I’d respond along with many that this is repressing instead of suppressing instincts and doing something that the human mind can accomplish without recourse to something that is unfalsifiable by nature. Not to mention there’s an irony of authoritarianism that tinges this sort of motivation to resist urges. If you only do this because you feel someone’s watching that you can’t see, feel, hear, etc, then you seem to be doing it purely out of fear of the unknown. And as with any argument about God, religion and morality, it brings up a more pressing issue: are you saying you don’t do bad things only because you’d feel guilt that God is watching you? So if you could be shown there was no God conclusively, you’d just steal, kill, rape, etc? It doesn’t reflect very good ethical impulses for a person to resist evil merely out of reverence or piety. Even Paul said something to that effect in the Bible. Albeit he reversed it and implied that fear of God is preferable to fear of the law in doing good and being righteous. In the reverse, of course, non believers might be more tempted to eat sweets or such, but at the same time, it’s not as if we can’t be mindful of our bad habits and change them through sheer force of will and further good habits. Our tendency to do bad things is universal; it doesn’t mean that one solution is automatically acceptable merely because it has more consistent results if it requires believing a falsehood.

On the issue that I’d linger on more, belief in God seemingly making people lazy, the obvious reasoning and connection people make is that when you believe you are not completely or mostly in control of things you’re doing, then you aren’t motivated to do as well as if you believed otherwise. In short, the criticism lies with a fatalism that’s partly present in monotheistic thinking, or at the very least implied and dismissed or avoided with clever philosophical and theological acrobatics about the nature of God’s foreknowledge and omniscience as well as God’s plan for its creations to have free will, but not sovereignty. Fundamentally the motivation issue is more important to me because it’s something that has always made me skeptical of especially devout religious people. You can devote yourself to certain causes with great passion, but your motivation isn’t humanitarian or humanist in nature; it’s based on either appearing righteous before God or simply following that God’s commands, neither of which make me or most people think you’re a good person. If you do good things because you feel good about doing them without any hope of reward, you’re a much better person in my book. Religious people can do this, of course, but you still expect some reward, either because of your works reflecting your faith or your faith as the motivation for doing good works. But that seems self serving and myopic in perspective since you’re concentrating on either getting yourself or others to heaven by saving them, witnessing to them, etc. Even charity can have this subtle undertone, though it isn’t always the case, I’ll admit. Some religious people don’t even think about evangelism when they’re being generous to others. But the attempt at any time to use your kindness to other people as a stepping stone to preaching really irks me and seems to actually put a wrench in the process. People would initially see you as kind and then react with disgust at how sanctimonious you are in doing it just to get that chance. By all means, do your charity work, I’m behind you. But underpinning everything with God makes you appear not only to have a holier than thou attitude, but misses the point of what ethics are supposed to reflect in great part, good relationships with other people, even if you disagree with them.

Regardless of if either of these possibilities is true across the board for theists or atheists, I can’t help but see the damaging effects of both for theists in particular. Resisting temptation due to fear of or reverence for a supernatural entity instead of for the sake of practicing virtue for its own benefit is not ultimately helpful for anyone. And I think everyone could agree that not being motivated to do your best at any activity because you affirm that things are to an extent determined not by your own efforts but by an agent outside of your control is damaging. We can all admit that there are things we can’t avoid or control without bad repercussions, e.g. the weather or time. But when you lose desire to diligently work because you put your fate in God’s hands, it not only hurts your relationship with others, but does little for your own work ethic. I’m not saying this applies to everyone, but the mere possibility suggests that if not confronted, people could just accept their laziness due to belief in God as something that they just have to accept in part since they can’t just suddenly disbelieve. No one’s saying you can’t believe in God and still be a hard worker. It’s just that the tendency for abuse of belief in God as an excuse for not working as hard is not conducive to progress in any sense of the word. Being mindful of how your beliefs affect your behavior is crucial and should not be pushed to the side, but made a priority. Even atheists should consider this, not just theists. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

Faith and Forgiveness, How Does It Work?

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/24/how-faith-can-help-and-hinder-forgiveness/

When speaking about religion and faith, one usually thinks of forgiveness being easier for believers. But there may be a much greater difficulty in reality. The difficulty in forgiveness itself exists either way, but it seems to be more difficult in terms of reconciling your own feelings with feelings towards a higher power that is involved with the world and its events, both happy and sad. When good things happen, you thank this power, but when bad things happen, one might lash out not at oneself or others, but at the original source of this suffering, God. Of course, Christians would eventually recover, understanding their own problems and overcoming them in time. When someone initially goes to God and finds God wanting, their anger only exacerbates the problem. If you instead concentrated on the real source of the problem and persevered through the inevitable suffering that results from the world that doesn’t always go how we expect, perhaps personal forgiveness would be easier. When you focus on forgiveness from others instead of forgiveness from yourself, you have your priorities reversed.

Some of the aspects of forgiveness and religion, in terms of theism especially, involves misotheism, or hatred of God, if only temporarily. When you are able to vent at some higher power, one might say you are able to get over the problem better. I’d argue the inverse, though. If you project your anger and frustration towards something that may not even exist or is so beyond human pleas to even care, then those feelings are wasted and misdirected towards what is essentially blameless or insensible. Of course, the contrary could be asserted with a deity that genuinely forgives and loves people even in their broken state. But even if this is the case, it fails to solve the original problem of confronting your own state of discontent.

To reference my Buddhist beliefs, when one has a problem in Buddhism, you don’t look outward first, if at all in some cases. Instead you look inwardly and see how your own thoughts and perspective have disposed you to behave or believe a certain way. With Christianity in particular, there is the sense of projection of your responsibility initially to God and realizing afterwards that you are the problem and God is not in any way affected by your petty mistakes beyond a general separation, what with being “holy” and such. Christianity therefore might be said to put an unnecessary first step into a more basic system that Buddhism presents.

First, do you go to a higher power to console yourself or do you meditate inwardly on the problem, considering both the possibility that you are the problem’s source or that some things just happen even if you did everything you could? If a person you love is hurt emotionally or even physically by your words or actions, there is a responsibility to take upon yourself that doesn’t require God belief in the slightest. The psychological sphere of guilt we all encounter at one point or another is especially pertinent. With guilt by virtue of believing in some original sin nature or even just the belief that you are inferior and imperfect before a sinless savior, Jesus, can make the forgiving process much longer and protracted than it needs to be. Of course forgiveness is difficult with such things as rape on the part of the one forgiving the one who hurt them or drunk driving on the part of the one who is seeking forgiveness as the driver who survived.

There is a strong theme of forgiveness in the Abrahamic tradition, no doubt, and it doesn’t even have to involve the God always in the background of the scriptures, especially in the Old Testament. There is the biblical wisdom to not let the sun go down on your anger, though some might take it too literally and not even sleep until they resolve their problems, which can cause more problems than it solves, if it does at all. Jesus also emphasized forgiving your enemies in the Gospels. Even the notion of God’s forgiveness might be said to have some comforting effect on people, though this creates a difficult standard to meet when you consider the perfection of God and in that way, we have the stereotypical guilt associated with Catholics and rituals of confession and contrition lumped together as creating a complex where you think you can do no right before the righteous judge known as God. With Jewish forgiveness, there seems to be less of a tendency to beg God for forgiveness and instead focus on reconciling oneself to your fellow human for wrongdoings. This is pertinent to my post “Jesus Doesn’t Solve Everything, Especially Sex Scandals” with Anthony Weiner’s Jewish faith in contrast to Albert Mohler Jr.’s Christian faith in terms of forgiveness of one sort or another.

I’m not saying religion is ineffective entirely in the business of forgiveness, but there is a decent argument to put forth that the psychological aspects of it are not so accessible in a religious context, since there is already a leap of sensibility in a person begging forgiveness first from outside themselves. Even if it does make sense to seek forgiveness, one should first seek to forgive oneself for wrongdoing instead of trying to blame and punish yourself as if it will cleanse you of the guilt. In reality, it only seems to reinforce the guilt because of the pain and regret you feel afterwards. You will feel pain and regret for a time; that is undeniable. Rape or drunk driving can both make forgiveness very difficult because of the nature of the parties involved. The first has a surviving party who was violated and feels they cannot trust anyone and the second has a party who has survivor’s guilt, wanting to die in the place of the person who they killed by their senseless decision. Either way, it is important to face up to the harshness of reality instead of facing away and finding consolation in something whose forgiveness is unconditional and thus has no challenge embedded in it at all. With God’s forgiveness, I daresay there is something too easy involved in the process, even if there might be difficulty on the part of the person to beg for forgiveness, but once you get over that hurdle, you’re stuck in a codependent relationship to an entity that is purely independent of you and is just taking your worship with the ease of walking. I could go on for a while longer, probably, but to conclude, forgiveness is a subject that has enough complexities already. Why would you want to involve God in this issue when God is already involved with the explanation for the world? Focus on the human area of forgiveness and you will become a more forgiving person with that practice over time. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

Divine and Human Relationships

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/11/12/our-take-your-relationship-style-determines-how-you-feel-toward-god/

This article might be shorter, since I was putting it off in hopes of a better story to write on. But in all fairness, this one is still compelling and stabs at the heart of most peoples’ beliefs. The gist of the article goes like so; since we are (allegedly) hardwired to believe in and have a relationship with “God”, the reason why there are people that disbelieve in “God” (such as Christopher Hitchens, his diagnosis with cancer just a way for their authors to sink their teeth into his atheism as relevant) is because their personality style is too negative, either of themselves, of others or both. This already seems too deterministic for my sense, even fatalistic on the part of the authors. If we are inevitably meant to come to “God”, then one has to ask why it is equally defensible to behave ethically towards others because it makes sense as a duty apart from religious convictions, causes the most potential and actual benefit for the greatest number of people or reflects innate virtues we can discern by reason.

One can have a positive regard for oneself and others in relationship style, but also find it less than compelling to extend that sense of relationship to a being that transcends humanity. This is especially so since “God” seems to be little more than an almighty will that either behaves indeterminately by caprice, or as it’s commonly called, grace; or by its own nature, is bound to choose things the most as the First Cause of all things that have free will and volition more than God would ever be able to. The real difficulty with this is that the conclusion of the article is already presuming that everyone already misunderstands God through institutional religion of sorts, supposedly why fewer people self identify as Christian or if they do, they stay clear of association with any church. They advocate seeing God as different from human relationships, resulting in you becoming more comfortable and willing to engage with God. This is all well and good except that it still brings up my objection of fatalism. No matter what relationship type a person might have: ranging from secure in oneself and others, overly secure in oneself and disregarding others, insecure in oneself and overly secure in others or insecure in both self and others, the authors claim that everyone can find a path to God.

This leads to what is ironically a point of contention between those that advocate religious tolerance and pluralism and those that insist that only their path has the fullest truth. This notion which is as old as Hinduism, manifests in the phrase “Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names,” Many contend that this is strong relativism, saying that every religion is equally valid. But just because I accept that Christianity has validity and compelling teachings to some people is not to say that I think that they are equally true in every aspect, especially in my personal convictions. There are no doubt personality types that are more disposed to believe in Dharmic religions that are focused on the here and now and those that are more liable to believe in what I term a teleocentric worldview.

However much Christians value creation (environment and animals) as befits being given dominion over animals and the earth with an obligation not to abuse what God gave them out of its love, their worldview still seems overly future based from my years as a religion major. I would study some form of theology in virtually any class, even in my philosophy minor, encountering Kierkegaard’s fideism alongside Aquinas’ more balanced method of rationality and revelation as complements. The prospect of a heavenly reward has never struck me as especially appealing, even assuming I had never heard of Nietzsche noting “in heaven all the interesting people are missing,” I had already thought many times about my future in the metaphysical sense. Would I want to live forever, would I want to never “suffer” in my corporeality, never need to practice and discipline myself in training in the martial arts, a pastime I enjoyed for many years and am compelled to begin anew? My answer to all these questions was a resounding no.

So maybe it is personality and relationship type that affects how one relates to God. And by association, the authors may have some tweaking to do in the relationship styles. Or at the very least, they may have to accept that those people with the Anxious or Fearful styles may not ever come to believe that they need a relationship with God to feel content and fulfilled. The “tweaking” I suggest is actually allowing for other combinations of regard towards both oneself and others. There is indeed the excessive or deficient regard for oneself as combined with similar overflow or lack of empathy towards others. That already gives us four types right there.

What about those who have something of a moderated sense towards themselves and others? What if, instead, these are improved relationship types and not the types that are the initial template for how we interact with people as we mature from youth? In this case, perhaps there is some merit to this idea, but one would have to extend it to one’s disposition towards particular forms of religiosity; Dharmic, Abrahamic, eclectic, syncretic, Right Hand, Left Hand, or any number of other possibilities. So while in one sense I can find common ground with these Christians that a magnanimous pity for Hitchens as he claims that he will most likely not convert at his deathbed, I would ask them to broaden their scope beyond just what makes their faith seem appealing to others. At the very least, they should concentrate on making religiosity in relationship seem appealing. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.